


Steady Hands, Unsteady Heart

by bigasswritingmagnet (thekumquat)



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: F/M, In Media Res, Panic Attacks, Serious Injuries, because this is seven pages long and it was supposed to be a drabble, doing first aid at home when you should really be in a hospital, not terribly explicit though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-02
Updated: 2019-08-02
Packaged: 2020-07-29 03:22:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20075305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thekumquat/pseuds/bigasswritingmagnet
Summary: Varric gets shot on his way home from a secretive meeting. Hawke needs to put aside her emotions and do the job in front of her.(This was originally a response to a sentence writing meme prompt. It got.  Long.)





	Steady Hands, Unsteady Heart

"I'm just tired," Varric said, with a wan smile. "That's all." 

Hawke's gaze traveled down to his left hand, which was pulling his duster tight across his side. Then further down, to the bottom of his coat. As she watched, a droplet of something dark beaded at the edge, trembled, and fell. 

"Varric," she said slowly. "Is that blood?" 

"...No?" 

Hawke rose from the desk, eyes fixed on the steady drip, drip, drip from Varric's coat. Her limbs were made of lead, and her fingertips were numb. Varric didn't fight her as she pulled his duster aside, and she was terrified that it was because he did not have the strength to. What she saw made her stomach roll, the brandy she'd had earlier threatening to claw its way back up her throat. 

He was wearing his customary red silk shirt, but one half of it was much, much darker, clinging to his skin and glistening in the candlelight. In the center of that horrible darkness was the snapped-off shaft of a crossbow bolt, jutting out like the mast of a wrecked ship. 

"I'll be fine," he said. "Just need to get it out and get it patched up." 

"Anders isn't here," Hawke said, dragging her eyes away from the horror.

"I know," he said. And he'd been about to try and deal with it  _ himself.  _

Hawke grabbed the paralyzing fear and thrust it away, back into the dark of her mind. There was a job to do. When it was done, and Varric was safe, then and only then would she be allowed to feel. 

She tugged off his jacket and let it fall to the floor, then put her hands on his shoulders and maneuvered him towards the fireplace, where the light was better. With no regard for collateral damage, Hawke swept everything off the table, scattering papers and cups and something that shattered on the floor. 

"Hawke," he said. 

"Don't." Her fingers dug into his shoulder, until he looked into her eyes, until he knew she was not going to be budged by anything short of divine intervention. 

And even then, the Maker would need a very compelling argument. 

He managed to get onto the table on his own, while Hawke darted off. Varric kept a stash of medical supplies in his room, mostly for patching up friends (her) after bar fights. Hawke had learned basic field medicine during her time in King Cailin's army. She hadn't been a miracle worker by any means, but no one had ever died under her care, either. 

She prayed that would be enough. 

The small box was left on a nearby stool, at hand but out of the way. Hawke tugged at the hole in his shirt that the bolt had left and pulled. At the first sound of tearing fabric Varric made a noise of protest. 

"Don't whine," Hawke said, in a distracted tone. "You were never going to get all the bloodstains out." 

"I liked this shirt," he said. 

“You’re going to like being alive much better.” 

Mercifully the bolt had gone in at an angle, shallow enough that it would have only scraped bone. If it had been straight on, it would have shattered his ribs; punched straight through and into his lung. It would have been a slow, painful death that not even a mage could have stopped. Every breath would have pulled blood into his lungs until he drowned—

Hawke’s shaking hands fumbled the bottle of disinfectant and it slipped. The container hit the floor, spraying acrid liquid across the wood that mixed with the drops of blood Varric had left behind.

“ _ Shit, _ ” she hissed. “Shit, shit,  _ fuck. _ ”

The bottle was half empty now. Stupid, stupid,  _ stupid _ —

“Hawke?” Varric started to sit up, concerned. “Are you okay?”

She pushed him back down with a strangled laugh. 

“Asks the man with an arrow in his side.” 

“You don’t have to--”

“Don’t even  _ think  _ about finishing that sentence.” 

Stop. Breathe. Focus. Do what must be done, first.

Hawke finished pulling the fabric clear of the wound and did not let herself compare the bolt to anything. Did not think about how strange it was, so dark against his skin, rising and falling with every shallow breath. 

“Blue bottle,” Varric said suddenly.

“What?” Was he delirious or was she so frantic she couldn’t think straight? But Varric pointed towards the medicine box. Shuffling around inside, Hawke produced a dark blue bottle. She popped the stopper off and remembered the smell of mint and elfroot, remembered Varric pressing a compress to her bruised ribs and the tingling numbness that followed.

She dumped half the bottle over the wound and Varric winced.

“It stings?” she asked.

“Cold,” he muttered, and her heart stopped in her chest. Was it the medicine or the blood loss? He’d lost a lot of blood. How much was too much? How cold did he feel? How long did she have? 

_ Andraste’s sake, pay attention.  _

“Do you want something to drink before I do it?”

Varric shook his head and shut his eyes.

“Get it over with,” he said, his voice soft in a horrible way. Hawke nodded. Put one hand on Varric’s chest. Wrapped the other around what was left of the arrow shaft. Pulled.

Neither the noise the crossbow bolt made when sliding free nor the noise Varric made, are noises that should ever be described. They are sounds that should exist only in the mind of the one unfortunate enough to have heard them, and for the rest of her life she would hope to forget them.

She threw the crossbow bolt aside, not caring where it landed, just that it was away from her and out of her hand. 

“Right,” Hawke said. “That’s the worst over, I think. Now I just clean that and stitch you up and you’re good as new.”

The cheer in her voice burned her throat like smoke and ash. Varric did not answer, his head lolling to one side.

“Hey.  _ Hey.”  _ She patted his cheek roughly until he opened them. His eyes were glassy and unfocused and she wanted to be sick. “Right. This is the part where you tell me what happened so I know exactly how badly to scold you.”

“Went to visit a friend,” Varric said, thickly. Hawke poured the last of the disinfectant on a clean cloth and Varric cut off with a hiss of pain as she pressed it to the wound.

“Don’t tell me your friend shot you.”

“Mm-mm. Some people think we—shouldn’t be friends,” he said. His gaze drifted over her shoulder; she snapped her fingers until he looked back at her. “Usually send some people to discourage me.” 

“Keep going.”

“They jumped me at the gate. Must’ve bribed the guards or something, to be that close.”

“Oh, Aveline will  _ love  _ that. And I suppose you stood there like a goon while they shot at you?”

“I got the first three,” Varric said, defensively. “Didn’t see the other one.”

“Go on,” Hawke said snidely, managing to keep her voice steadier than she did out of the fingers trying to thread a needle. “Tell me what witty one-liner you were giving when he got you.”

“I don’t know what—what you’re talking about.”

“Ability to lie still in proper working order,” Hawke said. “But I’ve seen you lie when you’re unconscious so that’s no proof of good health.”

Varric didn’t answer.

“Then what?” she asked, a little louder. He blinked hard once, twice.

“I heard him just before he shot me. Managed to get out of the way. Well. Most of the way.”

“And where was your friend in all this? Were they also too busy coming up with something clever to say?” Why hadn’t they been watching Varric’s back? Why hadn’t they been  _ protecting  _ him?

“No. At home. I can’t...I can’t bring her with me.” Again Varric’s gaze drifted away, past her shoulder. Again Hawke raised her voice to catch his attention before it could go too far. 

“And you didn’t go immediately to the Chantry healers because…?”

“I didn’t realize I’d been hit, at first. Thought they just grazed me. Wanted to go home and patch up. Wasn’t til I started to get dizzy that I realized something was wrong, and I was already in Lowtown by then.” 

Hawke narrowed her eyes at him. 

“And I wanted to be back on my home terf, in case any more came after me.” 

Hawke steeled herself for the next part. She tried very hard to focus on the motions that needed to happen, and not what she was actually doing. Not who or what the stitching was happening to. Varric winced at the first pass of the needle, and Hawke could not look at his face after that. 

“I hope she’s worth it,” Hawke said, and was surprised at how much she meant it. “This friend of yours.” 

So softly he might not have meant her to hear it he said “She used to be.” 

Hawke didn’t know what to do with that, but she needed to talk and to keep him talking. 

“So your plan was to what? Come up here, shoo me off, do all this yourself?”

“It’s not that hard,” he said, smile weak but playful. “You’re doing it, aren’t you?”

“Just for that, I’m telling Aveline on you, you ungrateful wretch,” Hawke said with a glare. “She’ll lecture you for hours, and I’ll stand there and let it happen.”

Varric didn’t answer, but he was awake and still smiling and that was enough for her. With care, Hawke tied off the last stitch and dropped the needle as if it would bite her.

“There,” Hawke said. “One dwarf, slightly used, still works well.”

She dressed the wound mechanically, nattering about how she would get Anders up here to lecture him too, and maybe she’d have Merrill cry at him for good measure, and surely Fenris would have something to say about all this. Isabela would probably approve, so she didn’t mention her.

“Thanks, Hawke,” Varric said suddenly.

“Of course,” she said. “What would I—” Hawke stopped. There was no safe way to end that sentence. She swallowed the words and searched for new ones. “You haven’t paid your bill yet, and I’ll be damned if I let Corff pin that on me.”

Varric chuckled, and cut off sharply.

“Ouch,” he said, flatly.

“Serves you right. Come on, you need to sleep this off.” She tried to take as much of his weight as she could as he sat up and climbed off the table, but he was very pale again by the time they got to the bed. “You rest. I’m going to try and make it look less like we rented the place to a Tevinter magister.” 

He gave her another wan smile, peeled himself out of the remains of the blood soaked shirt, lay back against the pillows, and was out. Hawke sank down on the edge of the bed. Despite what she’d said, she had no intention of going anywhere. She was going to stay right there until she was sure he wasn’t going to stop breathing.

The tremor began in her hands. It worked its way up her arms, spread like ripples in a pond until it touched her core. She wrapped her arms around herself and hunched over as her vision blurred. When the first tear fell, she pressed a hand hard over her mouth and only just managed to stifle the sob. 

Hawke wept. All the fear and horror that she had shoved away came back with a vengeance, multiplied a hundredfold by its delay. Her mind unspooled, all the horrible possibilities unwinding and tangling like bloody string. Varric dead, Varric dying, bleeding out in the street or here on the table as her shaking hands did more harm than good. 

How the others would have reacted. What they would have had to do in the aftermath. What to do with the body, with his things, how to tell his family. A lifetime without him. Worse than without him: with instead the sucking wound where he once had been. Darkness after light. Cold after warmth. Herself, sitting in her empty, empty house, all alone. 

Hawke became aware that there was a hand on her arm, and that it had been there for some time. She looked back. Varric's eyes were open, just barely, his touch gentle, comforting. Hawke tried to wipe the tears from her face, tried to pull herself together. He didn't need to worry right now. He needed to rest. 

But the tears didn’t stop and the reassurances drowned before they could make it to her tongue. 

“If you died-- what would I do if you died? What would I do without you?” 

He reached up and brushed tears from her cheek. 

“You don’t have to find out,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.” 

“You almost did. You were, you were going to, and I can’t-- I can’t do this without you, Varric. It’s so, it’s so much, all the time, everything that’s happening to me. I need....” 

Varric took her hand in his, she gripped it tightly. 

She tried to make a joke of it, tried to break the solemn, guilty look in his eyes, but the words that crawled out were carved from her heart. 

“I need my trusty dwarf,” Hawke whispered. 

“You’ve got me,” he said, and it sounded like more than a statement of fact, more than a promise. 

Hawke cried until she had no more tears left, until her insides felt scoured and hollow. Her grip on Varric’s hand had gone slack, her fingers stiff and her muscles weak. Silently, Varric reached up and pulled her down. She went without resistance, laying her head on the pillow beside his. 

Hawke couldn’t keep her eyelids open, so she listened to the sound of Varric’s breathing instead, slow and steady and reassuringly even. 

“Better luck next time.” 

She was dozing deeper than she realized, and it took her several seconds to find the energy to resurface. 

“Hmm?” 

“That’s what I was saying when the fourth guy shot me. ‘Better luck next time, fellas.’” 

Hawke raised her head and looked down at Varric’s face. He was still very pale, but he looked less agonized and more embarrassed. She stared at him until he gave her a sheepish smile. 

“You should be ashamed of yourself.” 

“I know,” he said with a sigh. “Can you imagine? I’d never be able to face the Maker. I’d have to be a ghost, haunting the streets of Kirkwall, lamenting the hilarious irony.” 

Hawke wanted to come up with something clever, but she was so tired all she could do was smile and shake her head at him. Laying back down, she shut her eyes and patted him on the cheek. 

“You’ll do better next time.” 

“Yes,” he said gravely. “From now on everything I say in a fight will be carefully crafted to be the ideal last words. Just the right amount of witticism and tragedy, just in case.” 

Hawke reached down and slipped her hand into his, squeezing gently. Varric fell silent, and soon they were both asleep, her head tucked against his shoulder, his cheek pressed against her hair. 


End file.
